It is all obvious or trivial except…

Out bidding Spud

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said if Labour wins the next general election it would “close the loopholes through which large corporations swindle the public”. He said the “tax gap” between what companies should be paying and what is actually received by the exchequer amounts to some £36bn.

Where in buggery does that number come from? That’s even larger than Spud’s fantasy about corporation tax receipts.

But wouldn’t it be fun if such returns were published? For the past? We’d see that there was no Vodafone bill nor deal, Starbucks, Boots, none of them did anything even odd.

If Murphy doesn’t want information, any information, in the public domain there will be a reason close to home. He is very keen on personal tax returns not being published and has long responded with fury to anyone suggesting partners’ reruns should be published.

The Bank of England did a report which near the back actually told you how some of that tax gap could be closed. It involved decriminalising the dark economy, recreational drugs, prostitution, that sort of thing. McDonnell was in favour of local authorities being able to licence brothels before he became shadow chancellor.
One wonderful thing about the decline of Labour in the polls is that if they decline any further they can start advocating policies that only 20% of the population might care about. While they hover around 25% ( and think like they have 30% ) they have to keep it mainstream.

My comment got buried on the Graun but I pointed out that corporation tax avoidance counts for £0.7bn of the gap. Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. are not part of that figure because having a European HQ and trading from there is not tax avoidance.

Given Spud’s current bee in bonnet about the GERs figures being just ‘estimates’ so are ‘made up’ statistics, how exactly does that sit with both his and others estimates of the tax gap? Surely they are as irrelevant as the GERs figures are?

Would the Richard Murphy who is arguing on his blog today that public disclosure of corporate tax returns would provide too much data to be usefully used be in any way related to the Richard Murphy who is arguing that Scottish revenue and expenditure estimates can’t be trusted because they aren’t based on enough detailed data that should be collected, like tax returns